Anoto

Anoto Group AB (former C Technologies) (OMX: ANOT) is a Swedish technology company developing and licensing a product line of digital pens and a product suite to manage information capturing utilizing these (marketed as Anoto). Anoto Group is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.

Product

Anoto's main product is the Anoto Digital Pen, a combination of ordinary ink pen and a digital camera (as well as supporting hardware) designed to digitally record everything written with the pen. The pen works by recognizing a special non-repeating dot pattern that is printed on the paper. The non-repeating nature of the pattern means that the pen is able to determine which page is being written upon, and where on the page the pen is.

The dot pattern can be printed on a professional offset printing press, or on a laser printer. Dots are printed in black; other colors of ink are invisible to the pen's IR sensor. On a laser printer, CMY can be mixed to produce near-black for text or other marks that are human-readable. For offset printing, Anoto has developed a color of ink, "Anoto substitute black." Anoto substitute black is a non-carbon based black ink that is invisible in the IR region, allowing you to include human-readable black marks with the dot pattern without interference.

While some of Anoto's licensees have targeted the consumer sector, most licensees sell their products to solution providers who put together customized vertical market systems. Anoto does not sell anything but the software development kit themselves. The pens and paper are all licensed to partners who sell them under their own brand. Anoto also sells an ASIC design for the image processing component of the pen; most pen vendors use the same basic design of optical assembly and pen internals.

These pens are used in optical scan voting systems in Germany.^[1]

Models include:

• Ericsson Chatpen CHA-30 (discontinued)
• Nokia SU-1B Digital Pen (discontinued)
• Nokia SU-27W (successor to SU-1B, rebranded Logitech io2[1])
• Logitech io2 Digital Pen
• Logitech io Digital Pen (earlier version, discontinued)
• Maxell Digital Pen (an earlier version might have been discontinued)
• Hewlett-Packard Digital Pen 200 (discontinued) (rebranded Logitech)
• Hewlett-Packard Digital Pen 250
• Fly (pentop computer)
• Livescribe Pulse Smartpen
• Anoto Anoto digital pen

C-Pen

Anoto also develops and sells the product C-Pen, a one-line text scanner.

Patents

Anoto holds more than 200 international patents on their technology.

In 2004, Anoto prevailed in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Oral Sekendur ^{[2] [3]} regarding the Anoto pattern technology. The Sekendur patent ^[4] was held to be invalid.

References

External links

• Signer, Beat (May 2008). Fundamental Concepts for Interactive Paper and Cross-Media Information Spaces. Beat Signer. ISBN 3837027139. 
• "Electronic voting 'world first'". BBC News. 2006-09-27. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/5385086.stm. Retrieved 2006-11-21. 
• Stroud, Michael (2002-12-22). "DigiPens Search for Write Market". Wired News. http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,56951,00.html. Retrieved 2006-11-21. 
• Anoto company website

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